IT Spends Too Much Time on 'Firehouse Duty'

It sounds somewhat like a bad IT joke that you’d hear in the office: “How many tech professionals does it take to fix an issue?” The answer is five, working a combined average of 100 hours of time that otherwise would be devoted toward pursuing business-benefitting goals. And that, unfortunately, is no joke. It’s just one of a number of eyebrow-raising findings from a recent survey from TeamQuest Corp. Far too much of an IT department’s time is spent on mundane, reactive, “put out the fire” tasks, results indicate. Increased staffing and training would certainly help, as would improvements in capacity management. “From a service delivery view, IT staff deal with differing capacity requirements from different business units,” says Scott Adams, director of product management for TeamQuest, an IT Service Optimization company. “And the only constant is that those requirements are always changing.” Nearly 215 tech managers at companies with at least 1,000 employees participated in the research.